Definition through profession:

Career

I happen to really like the word
'career'.
This is perhaps not so much in its job sense as in that speedier feeling
of the word; it's that feeling of full-tilt dashing. Maybe it's because
my career seems to have had a lot of that.

This isn't, obviously, a resume; it's more a
chronological description of the rushing about I've been doing, and my
reactions to it, in my typical stream of consciousness style.

An Informal Description

I'm a UNIX system administrator, and a proud (as of this
writing) member of USENIX, SAGE, my guild, and BayLISA.

I haven't updated this page for a tragically long time, and it is
probably self-evident from the content of the page why not. No doubt,
it will be a tragically long time before I update again.

[January 11, 2000 note: in the cause of strictest accuracy, I will
leave the above paragraph in permanently.]

Here's the generic blurb, since it's held pretty true for the last
couple of jobs: I'm working somewhere and really busy and we're
probably understaffed because it's hard to get enough sysadmins but I
really like what I'm doing and I get to run around and do lots of
things and learn lots of things. Sometimes there is stress and crisis,
but on the whole it's really fun. It's perversely even fun during the
crisis.

Right now I'm working in Santa Cruz (!!!) a few minutes away from
my newly purchased (or perhaps oldly purchased by the time I get around
to updating next) dream house. In other words, my quality of life has
gone way up, even though I still work all the time, and even better, my
work has a wider scope, is more challenging, and is more interesting
and getting me deeper into new fun technologies. I'll forbear detailed
description until I have anything of note or amusement.

The saddest recent event was going to Computer Literacy and finding
no high-end UNIX magazines there! I had an extensive rant there, but
it boils down to "who supports our subculture now"? Luckily I was able
to hunt around
http://www.performancecomputing.com/
and http://www.sysadminmag.com/;
from there it's pretty easy to find a lot of the free UNIX and
networking magazines.

I previously worked for Decisive
Technology in Mountain View, now actually subsumed into MessageMedia, Inc as a Swiss
Army knife (should I say Leatherman instead?) sysadmin, a job that
requires no little charging around. I defined new minimums of
necessary man- and womanpower for 24x7 site support, got my hands about
wrist-deep into Linux, learned more about security than I probably
wanted to know (look Ma, white hair!), and have continued to reiterate
the truism that necessity is a mother. Through crisis comes growth; I
regret it not at all, though a major problem was that it wasn't
convenient to my new house, so it was taking a large bite out of my
life.

Before that I worked at Sun
Microsystems, Inc., in Palo Alto. In October 1997 I made the
transition from Operations to Engineering, and busied myself with
various things including repackaging HotJavaViews
for automatically installing internal distribution.

Especially when working on HotJavaViews, I found it very difficult
to explain to nontechnical friends and family what exactly it was I did
for a living, which was an odd feeling. "Fixing computers for people"
was a nice coherent job description; "packaging HotJavaViews," for most
people, might as well be "starfing GarkleJavaWhatever." I'm still
trying to come up with an accurate description... perhaps using the plumbing metaphor for system administration? "I
teach software how to install itself" doesn't have quite the right
tone.

There may not be a place for humans in the future.
If we're really successful.

Okay, that's actually way too ominous in tone. But wouldn't it be
cool to be able to be Homo ludens, playing around while the
crystallized cleverness of our various systems handles all the boring
work for us? I'm not saying not working, here, since it's hard to
imagine people being happy if they're unproductive. But I've been
lucky enough to get to do work as play, so why shouldn't everyone? And
why shouldn't I get to up the "play" (that is, work that is its own
reward) quotient of my own work even higher?

My job before I got into the engineering job was doing general
system administration for a group of users, with some time spent on
video services, which involved video conferencing and video broadcast
over the network both live and from files. I got to have fun with Disk
Suite and JumpStart automations and nefarious combinations of the two,
as well as lots of other things, and it was all highly educational.

I previously contracted through Taos
Mountain Software, which is not in New Mexico, but rather is in
Mountain View, California. I recommend them as a contracting agency,
especially as they have given many good jobs to friends of mine as well
as myself. (Shameless plug alert.)

I spent most of my contracting time with Taos at Sun on the Move
Team, although I did spend an extremely caffeinated week at SGI in Mountain View,
doing pretty much the same thing that Cera was doing there, only
with less experience at it. The caffeine was not so much due to the
workload as to the fact that they have espresso machines in the break
room and I have little self-restraint when it comes to coffee. Among
other useful skills, I learned how to make cappucino. So if I ever
get tired of system administration, I can become a barista!

Before that, I worked at NETCOM
Online Communications, in more or less commuteworthy San Jose. I
was the assistant postmaster and a UUCP
administrator, along with Bryant Durrell, then
chief postmaster. I rather miss being a postmaster, as the work is an
interesting intersection of social and technical engineering, although
I never got heavily enough into sendmail.
Netcom is where I picked up my expensive yet satisfying O'Reilly habit, as well as a serious
addiction to caffeine. (Curse you, Bryant!)

In my larval stage I worked for Netcom as a technical support
representative (one of
Glee's Goblins). There I
learned how to be kind to stressed out people and how to support
software I had never seen, the common plight of tech support personnel
anywhere. These seem to be useful skills even if, in an ideal world,
they shouldn't need to be. But then again, in an ideal world all
software would work perfectly and I'd be a billionaire, not necessarily
in that order. (And I wonder which one I'd pick if I got my choice of
only one?)

Before that I did random work for temp agencies, mostly somewhere
between the data entry and random minor technical things level of work,
although I did get to do some typesetting and other UNIX work for the UC Santa Cruz Physics
Department, and for the Santa Cruz
Operation, both in Santa Cruz. (I know that rusty
skill with troff is going to come in handy again really soon, oh
yes.)

And back when I was an egg, I attended UC Davis with every intention of
becoming a genetic engineer. Unfortunately, agricultural allergies
(isn't there going to be gene therapy for this someday?) and lack of
money prevented this, but I was able to determine that I liked
computers better than genetic engineering anyhow. When I have some
time free from work (hee!) I intend to finish my education, although a
degree has not been required
in a career that seems more like Old World apprenticeships than
anything else.

This is a pretty simple concept; I've been telling people for a
while that system administrators are plumbers for computers. This is
because one of the goals seems to be in making a computer as easy to
use as a hot water tap. Most people, if they don't get hot water out
of the tap, or if they don't get any water at all, don't really care
why they're not getting it. That's the plumber's job. Keeping that
thought in mind makes user-level support easy. (I tend to need to
remember not to explain the entire underlying situation unless people
want it, so this is a good mnemonic for me.)

Obviously, using a UNIX system isn't nearly as easy as turning on a
hot water tap, but in the right environment, it can be easier than
driving a car. I'm not fond of the auto mechanic metaphor, though,
because it doesn't imply the surrounding infrastructure that plumbing
does. Plumbing is pretty inglorious, but so is system administration,
when you get right down to it. In both cases, the end user doesn't
really care to know the details!

This would imply that architecture is a good handle for a network
environment; in designing the environment itself, I'm not so much
fixing leaking pipes and dripping faucets as I am figuring out where
some of the pipes should be laid and what they should be made out of,
so that they don't leak or interfere with other things.